The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is poised to attack Iran. (US Navy photo)

IT MAY HAVE BEEN AMONG THE SCARIER MOMENTS in the run up to the war in Iraq—and one that has taken on eerie new relevance in light of today’s looming military confrontation with Iran.

In September, 2002, the British government of Prime Minister Tony Blair—seeking to help President George W. Bush bolster his case for an invasion—released a white paper making the alarming claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a ballistic missile attack with chemical or biological weapons against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes.

Predictably, the British tabloids went crazy. “He’s got him…Let’s get him,” screamed the headline in The Sun. “45 Minutes from Attack,” declared The Evening Standard over a picture of long-range ballistic missiles.

It was all a fraud, of course: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—no nuclear bombs, no mobile biological labs, as Bush and his officials claimed—much less ballistic missiles that it could unleash on British or American citizens. In the U.K.’s political folklore, Blair’s white paper came to be known as “the dodgy dossier,” and one of the top intelligence officials who worked on it, David Kelly, conceded to the BBC the document had been “sexed up.” Kelly later took a long walk in the woods and committed suicide, slashing his left wrist with a knife.

Nothing quite so dramatic followed President Donald Trump’s State of the Union this week when he outlined reasons for threatening the Iranian government with a full blown military attack. But at least one of his claims evoked Blair’s famously fallacious white paper.

“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said about Iran’s ballistic missile program.

In fact, there has been no intelligence reporting suggesting that Iran is close to having an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. homeland. A Defense Intelligence Agency report last year concluded that Iran wouldn’t have a “militarily viable ICBM” until 2035

“So I’ve been hearing the Iranians are a year away from being able to strike the United States for 25 years,” Jon Alterman, the longtime director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent national security think tank, said on the SpyTalk podcast. “At some point that may be true. I don’t have any evidence that it’s true now.” He also threw cold water on Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s claim that Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”